TEAM BIOBrett and Holly met 10 years ago in Montreal at McGill medical school, and are now married paediatricians working at Montreal Children’s Hospital. They take great pride in helping people and changing lives, but don’t let their career path fool you – these two are hard-nosed competitors. And when this couple disagrees, the sparks fly.

As doctors, they are an intimidating team with Brett as the more opinionated of the two. But don’t let Holly’s quiet demeanour fool you – they are here to win. “We are definitely ready,” says Holly. “Who ultimately wins clearly involves an element of luck but a team will always lose when they get careless.” Brett adds, “I don’t worry about doing things that are morally bankrupt.”

Brett and Holly have travelled around the world, but have done little travelling inside the borders of their home country. They believe THE AMAZING RACE CANADA is the perfect opportunity to see Canada and let their relationship grow.

Motto: “Total focus, eyes on the prize!”

How will they plan to win The Race: “Be cunning and resourceful, we are pros at functioning under pressure no matter what the conditions.”

Number one roadblock as team: “Over-analyzing. Our challenge as a team will be to embrace the quiet moments to refuel, get out of the game, and enjoy the beauty of Canada.”

Holly and Brett OK with being villains on ‘The Amazing Race Canada’ (even if it's only partly true)

By Sheri Block.

From hiding maps from the other teams to making strategic moves along the way, Holly Agostino and Brett Burstein know they were considered the “villains” on “The Amazing Race Canada.”

But the married pediatricians from Montreal, who were eliminated on the most recent episode of “The Amazing Race Canada” after struggling with the Detour in Iqaluit, say there was more going on than how it appeared on TV.

“I know the role we occupied on the show but I also know the relationships we made with everyone are very, very real and it’s funny because I don’t think (the other teams) would agree we are villainous. But we’re actually really OK with that,” says Brett with a laugh.

Holly adds they were definitely a polarizing team.

“We’ve got very mixed comments on Twitter and Facebook. Some people love us and some people hate us and some people love to hate us.”

“Even the ones that love hating us, I think many of them were sad to see us go because meltdowns are fun to watch,” adds Brett.

“We brought some drama,” says Holly with a laugh.

Despite rallying back on several other legs, the physical tasks required of the teams in Nunavut proved to be too much for Holly and Brett. The team struggled with building an igloo and decided to switch Detours, only to realize that throwing a harpoon at a target was a near impossible task for Holly, who took 90 minutes to complete the challenge.

“They were both physically hard (Detours), for me anyway . . . our igloo was not working and even if we had stuck with it and re-built it from scratch, we still would’ve been last,” says Holly.

Brett, who repeatedly said on the show they were not a physical team, says they played their best right to the very end.

“It’s a game that’s a combination of brain, brawn and teamwork. Two out of three of those we do better than one,” says Brett.

Brett and Holly say the leg in Regina, where they were narrowly saved from elimination after beating fitness icons Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod, was even more difficult than the one in Iqaluit.

“We felt more emotionally burnt because of what that day consisted of, even than the day we got eliminated,” says Brett.

“That day we got slightly less unlucky than Hal and Jo and every day more in the ‘Race’ was just bonus. That could’ve been our end.”

The team says there are no hard feelings towards the “BodyBreak” team for using the U-turn on them and they would’ve done the same if they had got to the top of the stadium first.

“You couldn’t have written better television,” says Brett. “I always wondered when (I watched ‘The Amazing Race’) how close is this really? You never see a shot of it being that close. (But that day) they were running, they were sprinting the stairs, so were we, captured in one shot. It was that close.”

But while the two might have been considered villains, when it came to their relationship with each other, Holly says Brett couldn’t have been more supportive, even though Brett constantly calling out “Holl, Holl” as she struggled through the challenges may not have looked that way.

“When I was on the verge of melting down, or fully melting down, it could easily have gone disastrous for us if he had escalated the situation but he was amazing. He was calm and supportive,” says Holly.

The team wanted to win “The Amazing Race Canada” partly to help them pay off some of their large medical school debt, but the married doctors were also planning on donating 25 per cent of their winnings to the Montreal Children’s Hospital, where they both work.

“That was one of the hardest things about not winning,” said Brett.

“We felt like we let some people down,” says Holly.

The couple has started the website AmazingCause.com where they have been blogging about their time on the “Race,” and raising donations for the hospital. They have currently raised more than $12,000.

“We wanted to reach people interested in reading what we have to say, a behind the scenes (take), but we also wanted to support the hospital,” says Brett.

Brett Burstein and his wife, Holly Agostino, know they are the team people love to hate on The Amazing Race Canada. And they're OK with that.

The pediatricians from Montreal were eliminated on this week's episode in Iqaluit, Nunavut. The couple was often portrayed as bickering and perhaps a bit devious, with Holly perpetually on the edge of losing it.

"I do not think it's morally wrong to hide maps," Brett says in a conference call, referring to moving maps in an airport store to keep them from other teams."I know we were operating within the rules to overcome some of our shortcomings...I do think the editing process was fair to me."

As for Holly, she knows how she came across on the small screen: scattered, defeatist and willing to give up when the going got tough.

"It was hard to watch at times, definitely," Holly adds, "but it wasn't special effects that I was breaking down."

Their time on the show "enhanced the strengths we had in our relationships," Brett says. "I think it is kind of polarizing how it appears we are engaging +on television.(But) Hol and I know that I was nothing but proud of her all the time."

What viewers didn't get to see, the pair says, was one of the reasons they went on the competition series: to give back to the Montreal Children's Hospital, where they both work.

They set up a website, amazing cause.com, to raise money for the hospital's charitable foundation, and pledged to donate 25 per cent of the prize if they won The Amazing Race Canada.

After narrowly missing elimination in Regina, however, the pair's journey ended in Nunavut, so they are out of the running for the $250,000, the Corvettes and a year's worth of travel on Air Canada.

They came in last on the leg after Holly took 90 minutes to hit a target with a harpoon on the frozen surface of Frobisher Bay.

"Trust me, I have played it out many ways in my head and there was no way we were getting out of Iqaluit," Holly says of the duo's decision to switch tasks during the Detour, abandoning the igloo they were building (badly) in favour of the harpoon challenge.

While they are closest to the two Tims (father and son duo Tim Hague Sr. and Jr.), the couple have stayed in touch with The Dudes, best friends Jet Black and Dave Schram. In fact, they watched this week's episode with the buff boys.

"I love Jet and Dave," Holly says as Brett reminds her (twice) that her husband is sitting right there. The pair tagged The Dudes as the ones to beat from the start of the race.

That "frat-boy" demeanour? Just a ploy to mask the fact that Jet and Dave are a "very strategic, very smart" team, the doctors say.

Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod, a.k.a. Team Body Break, were other strong contenders, they say.

So it was "absolutely shocking" to the doctors that they overtook that particular team in a physically demanding challenge to stay in the race two episodes back, Brett says.

That said, Holly says people aspiring to make it on The Amazing Race could do worse than reaching out to one of Canada's fitness icons.

The only Jewish competitor in CTV’s maiden presentation of The Amazing Race Canada last summer says that when he was 11 he decided that one day he wanted to become a pediatric cardiologist. Now an emergency room physician at the Montreal Children’s Hospital and the holder of a PhD in cardiology, he achieved his childhood goals. However, there was no thought of becoming a local reality TV star.Brett and his wife Holly, also a doctor at the same hospital, lasted until the seventh round of the show. The finale attracted 3.6 million viewers and crowned the father and son team of Tim Hague and Tim Hague Jr. as the winners of the $250,000 cash prize.The couple laugh at how the camera depicted them right up until their elimination in Iqaluit, Nunavut: bickering, hiding maps in an airport store and Holly suffering numerous meltdowns.“We were unfairly portrayed,” said Brett. “The storyline was written before we even showed up. We were definitely brought there to be rooted against.“I think one thing that maybe people don’t know through the editing process is how important it was for us to do the race, to be able to contribute charitably back to our hospital that has already given us so much.“If we won the Amazing Race Canada, it would not have even cut our educational debt in half. We were committed to giving 25 per cent of the prize to the hospital. We love where we work and we love that they sort of supported us the whole time.”Brett grew up in the Toronto neighbourhood of North York. Besides meeting his wife and participating in The Amazing Race Canada, he said one of the major highlights of his life was going on a Birthright Israel trip with his younger brother seven years ago.“It was an incredible experience I will never forget,” he said.So what is it like behind the scenes of the show?They applied to become competitors last February and were only notified two weeks before departure after first submitting a video, doing a screen test and undergoing medical and psychological evaluations.Since nobody was to know where they were going, the cover story was a five-week trip to China. A week before filming they were literally cut off from the world as training camp began. They were not allowed to use any kind of phones. The teams could not mix socially. When they stayed at hotels, the rooms were stripped of phones, televisions, radios and even things to read. A guard was posted outside their door and they could have one hour a day of exercise in solitude. They could not even use a washing machine, instead ringing clothing out in the hotel sink. It really was like being in prison, the couple maintain.Despite all of this, they look back on the experience with a smile and insist that if the opportunity presented itself they would do it all again.